Greetings Dear Readers,

Earlier this year I released a record of songs and readings called The Book of Bare Life & Returns: Praying the Psalms in the Anthropocene. It comes with the essay below printed in a booklet. Since I’m rather caught up in August behaviour, I’m putting it here. It was written last summer, and there are already things I would like to qualify or say more about, but I’ll refrain for now.

Blessings

DBB

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Praying Psalms in the Anthropocene

Religious sorts have always been among the most industrious and madly possessed makers of home spun publications, zines, pamphlets and radical tracts. From the politically explosive to the wildly strange, I find myself always fascinated by these small stapled-together portals into the deeply held stories and ideas of eccentric micro-communities, each with their own bent on the tale to be told. Each written with the earnest conviction that it speaks with the weight of apocalyptic consequence.

With some embarrassment and a wink, I suppose this is another one of those: a religious pamphlet. A tract! There could surely be no finer time to write one. We're all pamphleteers now anyway. Just try mashing together your last ten social media posts. The old meanings of everything are being shed like old skin these days.

Farewell Holocene!

Late July this year, 2022, scores of homes were burned down in London and Lincolnshire by spreading grass fires. It was over 40 degrees: the hottest temperature on record. I met a man from east Africa outside the dentist and he said it was just normal weather for him. My son asked if the heat was because of climate change. I found myself saying that it was hard to say if an individual event is the result of climate change, but an increase in such events certainly were. It sounded dull and removed. How do you talk about an apocalypse happening at the strange speed of the earth's climate systems? We're being thrown by an emergency into geological time.

Sometimes a thing is not really understood until it is gone. I keep hearing people these days calling the Holocene the "garden of eden." They're mostly scientists.

The Holocene was the geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago after the last ice-age. It was what they call an interglacial; a period of temperate climate between one ice age and another. It came with the paradise-like conditions in which the living planet became what we know it can be.

And then an amazing thing happened which has never happened before. The activities of one creature became so pronounced that the holocene epoch was interrupted and ended prematurely.

The Anthropocene, like any geological epoch, can be seen in a layer of the earth's crust. The layer will be distinguished, to future observers, by its disrupted carbon and nitrogen cycles, evidence of the mass movement, or displacement, of humans, animals and plant species, manipulated landscapes, architecture, bomb tests, a fossil record dominated by chicken bones and plastics, and all the marks of a changing climate pushing beyond the Eden-like stability of the holocene.

The Anthropocene - the human epoch - is yet to be enshrined in the official geological record, because that order has its own tradition of councils and synods and moots that must be observed, especially in such rude circumstances as we find today. That we have entered, or triggered rather, a new geological epoch, is generally accepted according to Prof Mark Maslin. The question is, from when to date the beginning of the Anthropocene?

Three of the four dates suggested by Maslin and Lewis fall in the very recent time span of modernity: the European colonisation of the Americas, the industrial revolution and the Great Acceleration from 1945 into a global order of consumer capitalism. The fourth option they suggest falls a long time before these; thousands of years ago in fact, with the dawn of agricultural humanity.

The Book of Exits

See the aged siblings, Abram and Sarai, wandering together away from the place that had been their home; away from Ur of the Chaldees. See them wandering off from some ancient civilisation that had grown out of the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia and the ingenuity of the new agricultural age.

It is said that the diet of the new agricultural humanity was much worse than that of the foraging hominids that preceded them. They had moved into nutritional monocultures. What they'd lost in food diversity, they gained in environmental control. They opted for the domesticated and predictable food source. This stability, made possible by the temperate climate of the holocene, gave rise to the need to keep and protect their harvested goods. There were storehouses and walls and small cities, kings and hierarchies, currencies and methods of notation, domesticated horses and armies to ride them to war. Here was civilisation.

Abram and Sarai were called to leave it all and become nomadic. They were to birth a new generation into the counter-intuitive precarity of their nomadic way of life (they were only half-siblings and ancient tales should be allowed a little strangeness).

This is one of a series of mythic exodus tales that come in succession. The tower of Babel was before it, and after is the story of Moses liberating the slaves from hard-hearted Pharaoh, a journey from pyramids to wilderness. In these stories, the dreamlike call of the Maker always draws people away from the vertical monocultures of agricultural civilisation, out into the horizontal complexity of All Things; out into wilder-spaces; away from those pioneering engines of the Anthropocene.

The mythical narratives of the Book of Exits are painted in stark colours, set in times when the cities were young. The further the books run into history, the greyer everything becomes. Civilisation is, of course, not all bad. Or perhaps it's because the only way out is through? Or perhaps it's because the fall itself is somehow beautiful and must also be gathered up into the redemption? Whatever the case, the distant children of the wandering siblings cannot escape becoming part of the systems of kings and walls and chariots and horses that hold together agricultural civilisation, even if these were the very things the nomadic god had forbade them in the desert. The days of the tent dwellers, who recognised no kings, were a mythic memory. It is from this embedded and complex space that the psalms come to us; from deep amidst the forming plates of the anthropocene. They carry a kind of longing that runs like a river beneath awareness. A longing for a way out to the quieter complexity of the wild things of Edenic memory, and the lost epoch of the holocene.

The Book of Bare Life

I’ve grown up with the Bible. I love it. I always have done. My favourite parts have been the myths and histories, the apocalyptic visions, and the poetic burn of the Prophets. These parts were less often bastardised in sermons and worship songs. They were too strange to make use of, so they were more or less left alone.

Not so the Psalms. I would see selected snippets of them on posters of waterfalls. I would hear bits of them in sentimental praise songs. In these, the psalms were vehicles of introspective, individualistic and spiritualised self-soothing, but they read very differently on the page. On the page, it was all ancient politics and tribal warfare, ecological poesis, unabashed schadenfreude, moral perplexities and pining discontent. It took a while to undomesticate the tradition and let its earthier colours and shades emerge.

One thing that recurs with striking regularity is the quietly widening abyss between nature and culture. The religious world of my youth had not the frame to even notice this constantly reappearing trope, let alone take any interest in it. In that world, nature was more or less understood as a metaphor for the spiritual peace that an individual might find in religious belonging. It had little or no intrinsic importance.

The songs on this record are, of course, my own readings of a handful of these poems. Here, the psalms are sung and prayed in the context in which I find myself: in the Anthropocene, newly unmasked, which by some reckonings, had already begun long before the psalms were written. Tangled amidst the political intrigues of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, the psalms too are, I think, reaching for a way out of the violent, hierarchical, unjust and de-natured world that had emerged with the human fall into the agricultural age. Reading the poems on this common ground, it seems to me that we meet a character, over and over again: the god of wildness, who is juxtaposed as entirely other to the grasping political powers of states and kingdoms.

Kings and rulers would often, rather anxiously and presumptuously, associate themselves with this god, but the feeling is not returned in kind. While kings wished, and still wish, to be found with the god of the psalms, the god of the psalms is ever to be found elsewhere: with the storm, the raging oceans, the thrashing of sea monsters and the trees in the wind; with hungry lions, with the sparrows, with the sun and the stars and the changing skies; with the quietly restoring stream and with the tree upon its banks. The Creator is found amidst the undomesticated complexity of wildness; of bare life. In the psalms, the ecological life of the living planet is not a metaphor. It is a generative m...